Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

What is man? Externally he does not differ much from the higher animals, the series of which seems to have been closed by his appearance on our planet. His physical organism is composed of the same elements, acting according to the same laws; and of the same organs, performing analogous functions. It is by the incomparable development of his mental life that man is distinguished, and little by little disengages himself from animality. Phenomena and laws of a new kind now make their appearance. The mysterious life of the spirit, emerging from the physical life, unfolds itself gradually like a divine flower, and gives the world, for us, its meaning and its loveliness. The region of the true, the beautiful, the good, is opened up to consciousness; the moral world is constituted as a higher order to which man belongs. It is these moral laws, capable of dominating physical laws and bending them to higher ends that, in the human animal, realise and constitute humanity. Man is only man in so far as he obeys them, and such is the point of transition that he occupies between two worlds, such the necessity of the crisis by which he must disengage himself from material animality, that, if he does not rise above the brute, he necessarily, by the very perversion of his higher life, falls beneath him.

From the beginning, physical life implies a double movement: a movement inward from the outside to the centre of the ego, and a movement outward from the centre to the circumference. The first represents the action of external things upon the ego by sensation (passivity); the second, the reaction of the ego upon things by the will (activity). This internal flux and reflux is the whole mental life. From this point we shall soon perceive the initial contradiction in which this life is formed, and in which it goes on developing itself continually. The passive side and the active side of the life of the mind are not harmonious. Sensation crushes the will. The activity, the free expansion of the ego, its desires to extend and aggrandise itself are checked and crushed by the weight of the world, which on every side is pressing in upon it. Springing up from the centre, the wave of life breaks itself inevitably on the rocks of outward things. This perpetual collision, this conflict of the ego and the universe,—this is the primary cause and origin of all pain. Thus thrown back upon itself, the activity of the ego returns upon the centre and heats it like the axle of a wheel in motion. Sparks soon fly, and the inner life of the ego is lit up. This is consciousness. Brought back by painful sensations and by repeated failure of its efforts from the outside, the ego begins to reflect upon itself; it doubles itself and knows itself; soon it judges itself; it separates itself from the organism with which at first it confounded itself; it opposes itself to itself, as if there were really in itself two beings, an ideal ego and an empirical ego. Hence comes its torment, its struggles, its remorse, but also the impulse ever renewed, the indefinite progress of its spiritual life, of which each moment seems to be but a degree from which it ought to rise to a stage still higher.

May we not here foresee the divine purpose of pain? Without it, it would seem as if the life of the spirit could not have arisen out of physical life. All births are painful. Consciousness, like every other child, was born in tears. The child of pain, it can only be developed by pain. Where do you find intelligence the most refined, consciousness the keenest, inner life the most intense, if not amongst the human beings whose external activities have been repressed by sickness or by some limitation in their social position? How else will you explain the Pensées of Pascal or of Maine de Biran, or the Journal of Amiel? Whence comes that extraordinary development of consciousness of which we are all aware in men like these, unless it be that they feel more profoundly than others that radical contradiction which constitutes at once the misery and the grandeur of human destiny?

Continue this observation; follow each of our faculties in its progressive expansion. Starting from a contradiction without which they would not exist, you see them all end in a contradiction in which they seem to perish, so that that which has engendered consciousness seems as if it must destroy it. Everywhere the same discouraging antinomy. Man cannot know himself without knowing himself to be limited. But he cannot feel these fatal limitations without going beyond them in thought and by desire, so that he is never satisfied with what he possesses, and cannot be happy except with that which he cannot attain. I desire to know; my labouring intellect is athirst to comprehend and understand, and its first discoveries enchant it. But, alas, my head soon runs itself against the wall of mystery. Not only are there things it does not know, but there are things which it knows for a certainty that it will never be able to know. How can a man jump off his own shadow, or stand on his own shoulders, to look over the impassable wall? That all which is intelligible to us is real, I grant; but is all that is real intelligible to us? And then what becomes my knowledge save a melancholy feeling of ignorance that knows itself to be such? The same contradiction in my faculty for enjoyment. As my seeming knowledge changed into its opposite, so now I see pleasure and happiness changing into pain and sorrow. Let the superficial and the vulgar lay on fate or things the blame of their deceptions and of their inability to be happy; as for me, I can only blame the inner constitution of my being. It is as the result of that very constitution that enjoyment bears within itself the cause of its own exhaustion, that pleasure is changed into disgust, and that pain is born of all voluptuousness. Pessimism is in the right; for it is proved by an experience only too long-lived that the only result of happiness exclusively pursued is an increase of the capacity for suffering. Need I speak of moral activity? I desire to do good, but "evil is present with me." I do not do that which I approve, and I do not approve that which I do: I feel myself free in my will, and I am enslaved in action. The more effort I make towards an ideal righteousness, the more that ideal, which I never reach, constitutes me a sinner and strengthens in me the consciousness of sin; so that here again, and here especially, the final result of my search is the opposite of that which I set out to seek.

Whence shall deliverance come? How shall I solve this contradiction of my being which makes me at the same time live and die? To free man from the miseries and limitations of his nature men count upon the progress of science and the amelioration of the conditions of his life. But who does not see that here is a new source of despair? How can we forget that, so far from attenuating it, science in its progress aggravates and renders mortal the original condition of life? To make a discovery, to explain a new phenomenon, what is this but to add another link to the causal and necessary network which science weaves and spreads over things? To put sequence, order, and stability into the world, is not this, for science, to put necessity into it, and to make necessity the sovereign ruler of the world? Science, in the strict sense of the word, is determinist. But then, prolong this progress of science indefinitely; multiply it by ten, by a hundred, a thousand; what do you do but multiply proportionately the weight of universal determinism beneath which our soul groans and ceases to strive? We should then end in the still more tragic contradiction—between science and conscience, physical laws and moral laws, action and reflection. The more the one enlarges and triumphs the vainer seems the other. Hence that philosophical dualism in which modern thought ends—a science which cannot engender an acknowledged morality, and a morality which cannot be the object of positive science. We touch the cause of that strange malady le mal du siècle, a sort of internal consumption by which all cultivated minds are more or less affected. It is an intestine war which arms the human ego against itself and dries up all the springs of life. The more one reflects on the reasons that may be urged in favour of living and acting, the less capable one is of effort and of action. Clearness of thought is in inverse proportion to the energy of the will. The Pessimists tell us that if we were fully and perfectly conscious we should lose the will to act, and even the desire to be. And which of us is not more or less of a Pessimist nowadays? Who does not complain of "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world"? Who does not feel his weakness and the pressure of external things? Who has not marked that union now become almost habitual of frivolity of character and intellectual culture the most perfect and refined? That sad monotone which comes to us on every wind, from the latest volume of philosophy, from the most popular novel, from the most successful play,—what is it but the melancholy sigh of a life that seems to be ready to expire, of a world that seems about to disappear. Must one give up thinking then if he would retain the courage to live, and resign himself to death in order to preserve the right to think?

From this feeling of distress, from this initial contradiction of the inner life of man, religion springs. It is the rent in the rock through which the living and life-giving waters flow. Not that religion brings a theoretical solution to the problem. The issue it opens and proposes to us is pre-eminently practical. It does not save us by adding to our knowledge, but by a return to the very principle on which our being depends, and by a moral act of confidence in the origin and aim of life. At the same time this saving act is not an arbitrary one; it springs from a necessity. Faith in life both is and acts like the instinct of conservation in the physical world. It is a higher form of that instinct Blind and fatal in organisms, in the moral life it is accompanied by consciousness and by reflective will, and, thus transformed, it appears under the guise of religion.

Nor is this life-impulse (élan de la vie) produced in the void, or objectless. It rests upon a feeling inherent in every conscious individual, the feeling of dependence which every man experiences with respect to universal being. Which of us can escape this feeling of absolute dependence? Not only is our destiny, in principle, decided outside ourselves and apart from ourselves according to the general laws of cosmical evolution, in the course of which we appear at a given time and place with a heritage of forces which we have not chosen or produced, but, not being able to discover in ourselves or in any series of individuals the sufficient reason of our existence, we are obliged to seek outside ourselves, in universal being, the first cause and ultimate aim of our existence and our life. To be religious is, at first, to recognise, to accept with confidence, with simplicity and humility, this subjection of our individual consciousness; it is to bring this back and bind it to its eternal principle; it is to will to be in the order and the harmony of life. This feeling of our subordination thus furnishes the experimental and indestructible basis of the idea of God. This idea may possibly remain more or less indetermined, and may indeed never be perfected in our mind; but its object does not on that account elude our consciousness. Before all reflection, and before all rational determination, it is given to us and, as it were, imposed on us in the very fact of our absolute dependence; without fear we may establish this equation: the feeling of our dependence is that of the mysterious presence of God in us. Such is the deep source from which the idea of the divine springs up within us irresistibly. But it springs at once as religion and as an effect of religion.

At the same time, it is well to note at what a cost the mind of man accepts this subordination in relation to the principle of universal life. We have seen this mind in conflict with external things. The mind revolts against them because they are of a different nature to itself, and because it is the proud prerogative of mind to comprehend, to dominate, to rule things and not to be subordinate to them. Pascal's phrase is to the point: "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. Were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the universe that killed him, for he would be conscious of the calamity, and the universe would know nothing of the advantage it possessed." That is why the material universe is not the principle of sovereignty to which it is possible for man to submit. The superior dignity of spirit to the totality of things can only be preserved in our precarious individuality by an act of confidence and communion with the universal Spirit. It is only on a spiritual power that my consciousness does actually make both me and the universe to depend, and in making us both to depend on the same spiritual power, it reconciles us to each other, because, in that universal being conceived as spirit, both I and the universe have a common principle and a common aim. Descartes was right: the first step of the human mind desirous of confirming to itself the sense of its own worth and dignity is an essentially religious act. The circle of my mental life, which opens with the conflict of these two terms—consciousness of the ego, experience of the world—is completed by a third in which the other terms are harmonised: the sense of their common dependence upon God. But is not this account of the genesis of religion too philosophic and too abstract to be capable of universal application? If it explains the persistence of the religious sentiment in epochs of high culture, can it also explain its appearance in the pre-historic ages of humanity? Those who raise this objection have not sufficiently marked the permanent nature of the initial contradiction which constitutes, at the beginning as at the end, the empirical life of man, and which renders it in all degrees so precarious and so miserable. It is not a contradiction created by logic. To experience it and to suffer from it man did not need to wait until he became a philosopher. It manifested itself in the terrors of the savage in presence of the cataclysms of nature, in the midst of the perils of the primeval forest not less than in our troubled thought in presence of the enigma of the universe and the mystery of death. The expression of human misery and the consciousness thereof are different things; the religious thrill which brings relief, at bottom is the same. Pascal, with all his knowledge, did not experience less distress than primitive man, when he exclaimed: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me." The disciple of Kant, shutting himself up in despair within the impassable limits of phenomenal knowledge, or the disciple of Schopenhauer ending in the internecine conflict between intellect and will, are they not smitten with a feeling of impotence still more painful, and, when they cease to reason in order to decide to live, do they not feel forming within themselves, and in spite of themselves, a sigh which is the beginning of a prayer?

Religion, therefore, is immortal. Far from drying up with time, the spring from whence it flows in the human soul enlarges, deepens, and becomes more rich under the twofold action of philosophic reflection and of the painful experiences of life. Those who predict its approaching end mistake for religion that which is only its outward and fleeting expression. The periodical crises in which it seems as if it must perish, renew its traditions and its forms, and, so far from proving its weakness, demonstrate its fecundity and its faculty of rejuvenescence. Never, in all history, has the human soul been seen entirely naked. On this tree, in which the sap divine mounts ever, the leaves of one season only fall, however dry they may be, under the pressure of new leaves. Religious beliefs do not die; they are simply transformed. Let the friends of religion then cease to be alarmed and its enemies to rejoice. The hopes of the one and the fears of the other show an equal misconception of that which is its essence and its principle. If they seek it in themselves, they will find it all the more living in their inner life, the more its traditional forms outside themselves seem menaced. The sigh, the impulse, or the melancholy of the soul in distress are more religious than an interested or mechanical devotion. There are hours when the heresy which suffers, and which seeks and prays, is much nearer the source of life than the intellectual obstinacy of an orthodoxy incapable, as it would seem, of comprehending the dogmas that it keeps embalmed. Let the men who despise religion learn first to know it; let them see it as it is—the inward happy crisis by which human life is transformed and an issue opened up to it towards the ideal life. All human development springs from it and ends in it. Art, morals, science itself fade and waste away if this supreme inspiration be wanting to them; the irreligious soul expires as if from lack of breath. Man is not; he has to make himself; and in order to this he must mount from the darkness and bondage of earth to light and liberty. It is by religion that humanity begins in him, and it is by religion that it is established and completed.

3. Religion is the Prayer of the Heart